> Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
> Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
I do both of these things.
Do I want to destroy my organisation? No. I want to prevent miscommunication and haste from destroying it.
I dislike the popularity of this list for this reason.
That's the point of this document. To enumerate types actions which are:
* 100% valid and necessary in some contexts (this is your point IIUC)
* ...but can nevertheless be used for organizational sabotage if overdone on purpose (point of the article)
* ...and lead to Dilbert hell if done because of bad incentives (the reason why this article keeps being so popular among office workers)
> Do I want to destroy my organisation? No. I want to prevent miscommunication and haste from destroying it.
And yet, do you not see how if _every single thing_ that your organization does went through this process, it would find itself in gridlock of decision making? How would your organization fare if it has to spend two weeks just do decide if the paper cups at the water cooler should have knurled or smooth bottoms. Or if the decision over whether you should implement a minor feature that would take an engineer half a day takes several months.
The manual isn't suggesting advocating caution when it's needed, it's advocating extreme caution when none is needed.
I think that's the reason why this list is so clever.
It is made so that it is hard to tell the difference between sabotage and being genuinely helpful. If you ask people to advocate caution when you know there is a good chance for an accident to happen, it is helpful. If you ask people to advocate caution even though the risk is low and everything goes well, it is sabotage.
Precise wording may be important in a legally binding contract, or when misinterpretation can have serious consequences. The way you sabotage is by doing that on points where it doesn't matter. For example, let's say you want to publish a memo telling people to bring back the encabulator to the store room after they finished using it, a common sense reminder. A saboteur can start arguing what is meant by "finishing", for example, what if it is needed an hour later, maybe suggest a logbook, special rules about overnight use, etc... when in reality, all that is needed it to remind Bob (who may be a fellow saboteur) not to be an asshole.
I've seen cases where 100+ people were required to attend multi-day meeting marathons to agree on the perfect sprint goal formulation, a negotiation held hostage by a few pedants that were never quite happy with the exact wording.
That's like 2000 man hours down the drain to produce a sentence I'm not even sure who is the intended audience for.
The flipside is seeing thousands of hours wasted building the wrong thing because people couldn't be bothered to communicate properly. "Getting the words right" turns out to be a fundamental step for producing successful software - not because the words themself are directly important, but because it's a reflection of a robust mental model of the problem.
To be clear, these wordings has no impact on what was to be built, that had already been decided at a separate set of meetings. This goal setting meeting was sheer process.
At some point, the cost of building not quite the right thing has to be weighed against the cost of spending literally millions deciding on what to build next.
There is a difference between what is perceived as effective communication and what is actually effective communication. More communication for the sheer sake of more communication almost never means more effective communication or coordination.
Honestly, it sounds like there will still be a few pedants who disagree with the phrasing of this new Commandment.
To me, what you described sounds like both Hell and entertaining Theater; Theater the first couple of times, Hell at 3+. It’s alternatively The Ninth Layer Of Hell if I have to provide input at any point for any reason.
I don't think the simple symptoms lead to the illness in this case. Which is to say, even if you do these things, you might do them in a well intended way, and with an overall positive impact. Lawful good and lawful evil are both lawful. Law in itself doesn't indicate evil (or good, for that matter!).
I think both of you are holding the idea of ranking organisational strategies on a linear scale. But what works for a tech startup might not be good for operating a chemical plant.
The worst cases of pointless busy work I've seen were when everyone follows an out of date plan that they know is out of date because the effort to change it is too high.
Everything exists on a gradient. Your goals are valid and methodology probably as well if you meet them.
Do you discuss the minutiae of what you guys can eat for lunch? Probably overdoing it.
Do you discuss the minutiae of a technical piece of equipment or software that is mission critical? Probably the right kind of effort to be as precise as possible.
> Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
I do both of these things.
Do I want to destroy my organisation? No. I want to prevent miscommunication and haste from destroying it.
I dislike the popularity of this list for this reason.